Appearance
Nightside the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun)
A young priest named Silk is enlightened by a god known only as the Outsider, who burdens him with the task of saving his church from demolition.Nightside takes place over a mere two days, which inflicts on it a snail's pace and the feeling of floundering in too many details. The act of breaking into someone's mansion took more than half the book. Rituals were described in full, beginning to end. Yes, this book is a set-up for greater things to come, but still suffers from its pace, and probably could have been condensed to half its size. It was also filled with great characters, enigmatic events, bizarre creatures, and "gods" that might not be all they're cracked up to be. I look forward to the remainder of the series.
Nightside the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun)
Gene Wolfe is an excellent writer, who captures the imagination. I have found most science fiction to be short of good writing or well constructed characters. Wolfe's characters feel and act real, not as the lab rats most sci-fi authors release in their novels to show how well constructed their tech. is. All the books in this series are excellent, one of the few sci-fi books I would give to a friend.
Nightside the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun)
This was my first encounter with Gene Wolfe, and indeed it was all I'd been told to expect. While not a whole lot of action takes place in the course of the story (indeed, another, lesser writer might have told the same tale in less than 50 pages), the writing and characterization are such that you simply cannot put the book down. Silk is a remarkably multi-faceted character, exhibiting at turns confidence, doubt, fear, compassion, and naivety. Most enjoyable of all, he's more clever than he tends to let on; on several occasions, the reader wants to shout the answer to a puzzle to Silk, only to find out later that he knew it all along. Masterful writing by Wolfe. Now if only these books weren't so hard to find-- I've gotta read #2!
Nightside the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun)
Equally as rich as, but far more accesable than, Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
The tragedy of the Chinese revolution
Isaac's book, "The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution" is both an excellent look at the Chinese Revolution and its betrayal by Stalin and the Chinese bourgeoisie as well as a superbly written piece. Isaac's wide access to sources allowed him to paint a true picture of what happened during the Chinese Revolution, sifting away many of the historical falsifications that have been committed by the Stalinists, Maoists, and bourgeois figures over the years. This is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand China's past and present.
Collecting Spatial Data: Optimum Design of Experiments for Random Fields (Contributions to Statistics)
Spatial statistics is an important subject, and there are excellent books such as Ripley, Cressie's books. However, very little work has been done on how to collect spatial data, though experimental design is an old but important subject in Statistics. This book, now in its second edition, makes an excellent start in this emerging area. This reviewer, fortunately, has the chance to participate in a multinational weather experiment in which one of the goals is to collect additional spatial data for improving existing data network and for improving short-time-scale and mesoscale weather forecast. This led to our study of adaptive design for spatial dynamical systems and spatial fields, leading to a 1999 paper on J. of Atmospheric Sciences and a book Chapter in Studies in Atmospheric Sciences published by Springer in 2000. Now, adaptive spatial design, or targeted observations, is an very hot area in meteorology, and many papers have published in meteorology dealing with various aspects of applications. There are good economic reasons also for doing adaptive design, though practical impacts of this approach need to be justified also. After making this unnecessary detour, what do I think of this book? Well, I think it's an excellent supplementary book for a spatial statistics course. This book only covers the classic aspects of spatial design, namely a frequentist approach to static design for standard spatial estimation and prediction, with applications such as in designing monitoring stations. By combining with our more recent work optimal design using Bayesian methods, you probably get a very good coverage of statistical design for spatial or space-time fields, an area which I foresee more developments in the future.